1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to e-mail and, more particularly, to an innovation to categorize e-mail
2. Description of the Related Art
Electronic mail (e-mail) has proven to be an efficient and effective communication mechanism for both personal and business purposes. Use of e-mail has become so wide-spread that e-mail communicators can become inundated with messages. To handle message volume, message recipients typically group incoming e-mail into categories. Different categories can have different priorities in the mind of the recipient, which can vary over time.
For example, if a manager of projects establishes multiple project-specific categories, the importance of received e-mail can be directly proportional to project deadlines and other project-specific factors, which can shift over time. That is, once a specific project's deadlines have been met, its relative priority can shift downwards in relationship to another project having more urgent deadlines.
Categories, however, are not just limited to business projects, but can instead represent any definable facet of a recipient's life. A recipient can, for example, categorize messages to distinguish personal messages from business messages. Personal messages can be categorized differently for family, friends, relationships, hobbies, amusement, and so forth. Categorization of e-mail can be performed implicitly or explicitly.
Implicit categorization can involve a recipient glancing at incoming e-mail messages and reading or responding to these messages based upon subject line, date, and sender. Practical concerns like message volume, e-mail storage space restrictions, and temporal priority shifts can cause implicit categorization techniques to fail or to at least cause problems. The situation is analogous to a professional who retains all phone numbers, appointments, tasks, and notes in a disorganized or at least not an explicitly organized fashion—over time important matters are overlooked, which is why contact management software and contact management systems are commonly used by executives, staff, sales people, students, and the like.
When e-mail is explicitly categorized for a single e-mail account, different folders or cabinets, each representing a category, can be used to store e-mail correspondence. Automated tools provided by an e-mail application, such as a message sorting tool, a message search tool, an archiving tool, user defined automated rules and actions, and the like can be used in conjunction with these folders and cabinets to provide some help with message management.
Despite these tools, separating out e-mail messages into the established folders can be tedious and time consuming. Further, when many folders exist having overlapping content coverage, users can forget which folders or subfolders were used to organize a desired message. Accordingly, the same problems experienced with managing documents through a hierarchical file management application can be experienced by users attempting to use folders to organize e-mail.
Another means to explicitly categorize e-mail is to utilize multiple e-mail accounts, such as a business account and a personal account. Nothing, however, prevents senders from using a familiar (albeit outdated or incorrect) e-mail account for correspondence. For example, a family member or friend can use a known business e-mail account to send personal messages. Commonly, since it is easy to send a single message to multiple e-mail accounts, senders of e-mail will include all known e-mail addresses for an individual when sending that individual messages, which circumvents the recipients intent to categorize e-mail by e-mail account. Further, maintaining, utilizing, and checking multiple e-mail accounts can be burdensome to manage.
An innovation is needed that enables e-mail users to define categories, which are to be subsequently used to manage e-mail correspondence such that the innovation is flexible enough to shift as user defined categories and roles shift, yet which is simple and intuitive for e-mail communicators to utilize.